


From the Wave, we Rise

by mari4212



Category: Nation - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Character Study, Gen, POV switch, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 08:27:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5450015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mari4212/pseuds/mari4212





	From the Wave, we Rise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mayachain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayachain/gifts).



Cahle's birthing pains started a full half day before the canoe docked at the island of the Sunset Wave Nation. She stayed waiting, breathing through the surging pains as her husband and his brother went to shore to talk with the boy and old man. Here, at least, there were people. Sunset Wave Nation was one of the largest, an island so big they didn't have to share a women's birthing place with other nations. They must have survived with women who knew the chants, who would help with the pain.

The boy ran off towards the jungle as Milo and Pilu returned to the canoe. She could see from Milo's eyes the news. The wave had come here too, had taken for Locoha even from Sunset Wave. Pilu was smiling, trying to hide his worry as he babbled about the boy going to fetch a woman who knew a great many things about healing. When Pilu was calm, he could make anyone believe his stories, but Cahle had known him since they were children, and she could read the fear in his eyes, fear that had not left since the wave had come. 

Milo said nothing, but his hands shook as he helped her out of the canoe, and he clutched her tighter against his side as they waded to the shore. The old man did not speak to them, but waded out to help Pilu pull the canoe past the waterline. 

The boy came running back, a trouserman girl following after him. She clutched at a box as if it were a totem. Cahle ignored the conversation, distracted by an even larger swell of pain from her belly. She dug her fingers in to Milo's broad shoulder and snapped at Pilu's relentless need to talk to everyone about everything, and that finally prodded the boy into action again as he led the way in to the Woman's Place. 

The trouserman girl started out well enough, shouting the men away from women's secrets. Right now, Cahle wanted her husband nowhere near her. The only people who should be with her, her grandmothers and her mother's sisters...she wouldn't think about that now. Not with the urgent pain and the drive to push coming on strong, without even a birth chant to guide her onwards.

She clutched at the trouserman girl, a pale substitute for the women who should be singing beside her, and hissed her question around the next spasm, "Why are you not singing, ghost girl?"

The trouserman girl babbled meaninglessly at her, then stuttered into silence as she opened a trouserman sacred object. Pilu had told her once that trousermen worshiped things they called books, where they put their knowledge because their minds weren’t big enough to hold it all properly. This object had to be one of those book things, but clearly the girl didn’t know how to use it properly, or how to put it away and concentrate on what was important here. 

Cahle’s belly seized again, and she clutched harder at the trouserman girl. “Sing, girl. Even trousermen must know how to give birth properly.”

The trouserman girl dropped the book, her eyes finally focused on Cahle. For a moment, she was still the nervous little girl, fumbling like it was her first time ever participating in women’s mysteries. Then, as Cahle watched, the fear fell away from the trouserman girl’s face, and calm strength and knowledge washed over the both of them like the wave had washed over the islands. The trouserman girl began to sing an incomprehensible song, but Cahle didn’t care. The words did not matter anymore. What mattered was the baby to be born, and that the birthing song was sung. 

The melody was light and lilting, and as she sang, the trouserman girl knelt low between Cahle’s legs and brushed aside her skirt. The pangs came again, and Cahle held back her cry as her entire body seemed to spasm at once. Then there were hands in place where they needed to be, and the most beautiful sound in the world replaced the trouserman girl’s voice. Her baby’s cry resounded again as the trouserman scooted up from Cahle’s legs, depositing the child straight into Cahle’s arms. He was beautiful as well, still wet and streaked with red from her birthing blood, hands balled up in fists and squirming at first as she brought him to her breast. She barely noticed as the birthing caul slithered out of her with another spasm, too enraptured by the tugging at her breast as her child, her son, latched on. 

Distantly she was aware of the trousergirl speaking, and some mopping up down there with leaves and moss. At least one concept transferred without her needing to understand trouserman language, the disgust and worry evident from the girl’s tone alone as she awkwardly wrapped the birthing caul and her son’s birth cord up and placed them to one side. It didn’t really matter immediately, though one part of her noted that she would have to teach the girl how to properly handle such items, to keep them safe as her boy’s child soul grew. 

She barely noticed as the trouserman girl went out to the door of the birthing place and spoke to the men gathered, though she easily heard their shouts of joy. It was as meaningless to her in that moment as were the words that came after. The next thing she paid any attention to was the arrival of another woman with a baby, and the trouserman girl’s begging hand gestures as she tried to explain herself. As if it wasn’t obvious that a child needed milk and the mother was no longer capable. Cahle released one hand from her son and waved for the other child to be brought closer. She had two breasts, after all. 

Time passed, set apart from the normal tracking of time by sunlight and chores. Instead, time came and went at the baby’s schedule. Cahle woke when they woke, fed them, and then she would hold her son as the Unknown Woman held her own. The Unknown Woman did not much else, but Cahle did not have the attention to care about her, though normally she would have unleashed her scorn on any woman who decided to be so useless. It was obvious that the woman’s place had been untouched since the wave, and that the trouserman girl, who Pilu had finally explained was called Daphne, had known how to do nothing with it. Still, Daphne at least tried to follow along as Cahle explained how to do everything. 

But more important than anything else, than the Unknown Woman, or Daphne, or the men on the island, even Milo and Pilu, was Guiding Star. Pilu and Milo had come to her as soon as she left the birthing place, and while Milo stared in utmost adoration at his son, Pilu had stopped to explain his name and the birth prophesy of Daphne’s song. Pilu considered it important, a sign of how special his nephew would be to the new nation that was forming. Cahle had not needed any such prophecy to know what her son was. He was her son, her family, the last born of a nation that was all but gone, and the first born of the new nation they were building. Moreover, he was hers, her treasure carried through the ferocity of the wave through until they reached safe harbor. He would be Guiding Star to the children who followed him, but to her, he was simply her light.


End file.
